So when Dole moved toward seeking the GOP presidential nomination last week, there was an inevitable preacherly tone in her Piedmont drawl. Ringed by supporters at a restaurant in New Hampshire, she portrayed her possible candidacy as a witness for Christian decency. “There’s yearning to make us a better nation,” she said, clip-on mike in place. “We need to get back to basic values: personal responsibility, honesty, integrity … cooperation over conflict.” Leading the Red Cross, she said, she’d enabled people to share their blessings. “Aren’t we blessed?” she asked. Only the “Amens!” were missing.
In post-Monica Washington, Republicans are weary of moral crusades. In Congress, they’d rather talk about Chinese espionage. But Pat Buchanan launched his third bid for the presidency in the name of populist trade policy and faith in God. Lamar Alexander kicked off his campaign from his Bible-belt base in Nashville, Tenn. Before announcing his own “exploratory committee” in Austin, the front runner–Texas Gov. George W. Bush–spoke to a vast Baptist congregation in Houston about how “faith-based” institutions can solve such social ills as teen pregnancy and crime.
There they go again, preaching to the Amen Corner. They can’t help themselves. In Congress the Clinton scandals ended up hurting the GOP more than the president. He looked pathetic, but they looked like censorious snoops. Still, Christian activists remain crucial in places like Iowa, and even in New Hampshire–in that supposed redoubt of secular, tax-cutting conservatism–Republican leaders say that moral issues will loom large in the Y2K campaign. It’s going to be trickier than ever–but more important than ever–for Republican candidates to give a sermon on a moral text without looking like slaves to its orthodoxy.
That won’t be easy. Christian activists want to hear more hellfire and brimstone about the decline of Christian civilization. They still see abortion as the ultimate test of national values. The delicate task for the GOP contenders is to pull a Clinton, talking the talk to the faithful before tiptoeing to the middle. “We had our ‘bosses,’ and we got clobbered for years until we learned how to deal with them,” said former White House strategist Paul Begala. “Now it’s Republicans who have bosses to deal with. It’s Boss Pat Robertson and Boss Jerry Falwell.”
In some respects, Begala is crying wolf. The religious right is divided and confused in a way it hasn’t been since evangelical Christians first flooded into politics at Jimmy Carter’s behest in 1976. Below Bush and Dole, a half-dozen candidates are scrambling to claim the religious right as their own, a battle that could dilute the constituency’s power. Buchanan’s entrance–which surprised and angered rivals such as Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes–will step up the war in the Amen Corner.
And many Christian conservatives have begun to question whether politics is worth it at all. It’s as though the public’s seeming acceptance of Clinton’s transgressions has soured evangelicals on politics. In a new book, movement leader Cal Thomas argues that Biblical morality can’t be enhanced by temporal leaders. “There’s no such thing as trickle-down morality,” Thomas writes in “Blinded by Might.”
Still, none of the 11 candidates in the GOP race is likely to ignore–let alone attack–the Christian right. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, a quarter of GOP voters describe themselves as “religious conservatives.” That percentage rises in events such as the early–and important–Iowa caucuses. Christian Coalition chairman Robertson came to Washington last week to talk numbers. The figures were impressive: he vowed to raise $21 million, hire 100,000 field organizers and distribute 75 million “voter guides” to influence the Y2K election.
The way to pacify “bosses” like Robertson, GOP strategists know, is to appeal to his supporters on your own–and on your own terms. With his charm, money and vast popularity in Texas, Bush is well positioned to do so. He knows the New Testament language of redemption, and claims to have lived it. His wife, Laura Bush, is a devout Methodist whom he credits with saving him from a raucous and long-running bachelorhood. Bush once called the Bible a “pretty good political handbook,” and has testified about his faith–privately–to Robertson and other Christian leaders.
But Elizabeth Dole has just as good a chance–if not a better one–to be the Clinton of the right. For a party seen as short on compassion, she offers the ultimate answer: her gender. “She reaches into both genders, all age groups, occupational groups and income groups,” said polltaker Peter Hart. Her Red Cross tenure has been criticized for bureaucratic shortcomings. But the essential mission of the institution underscores a theme of “compassionate conservatism” Bush is trying to trumpet. She’s never run for office before, but she was a close adviser to her husband’s three presidential campaigns, and a cabinet secretary twice. Add a touch of Thatcheresque toughness on foreign policy, and she’s formidable indeed, says former Clinton guru Dick Morris.
For Dole or Bush, emoting about your faith and your resume is the easy part. The devil is in the details–particularly of the abortion issue. Bush stumbled last week by not immediately declaring that he supports a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. When he finally did, he added that it was unrealistic to expect the amendment to be adopted any time soon. He was right, but that was not what even some of his own advisers wanted to hear. The two-day snafu brought condescending comments from rivals. “George is a nice guy,” Buchanan told NEWSWEEK, “but he needs to practice in front of the mirror.”
Watching Bush’s stumbles, the preternaturally cautious Dole refused repeated opportunities to define her own abortion position last week. “She knows what she wants to say,” one source told NEWSWEEK. “She’s just not eager to say it.” She abruptly canceled a TV-network interview, NEWSWEEK learned, when she heard that she would be grilled on details of the difficult subject. When Dole does speak, advisers told NEWSWEEK, they expect her to say that she is “personally pro-life,” and that she supports various measures to reduce the incidence of abortion. But, unlike Bush, she reportedly does not favor the so-called Human Life Amendment. If so, she will be changing her position from 1996, when her husband was the GOP nominee. That year she told an interviewer that she supported the party platform, which did call for such an amendment. So which is it? On a trip home to North Carolina last weekend, she wasn’t saying. But soon enough she’ll have to speak, and when she does, everybody in the choir will be listening.
